“It’s a singular moment in humanity,” said Vincent Tang, the principal deputy director for the National Ignition Facility and Photon Science Directorate at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
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This 2023 story reminds me of NIF back in 2009.
2008:
ALL LLNS “Career Indefinite Employees” working on the NIF project, were given “exempt” employment status, and could not participate in the LLNS retirement incentive offered at the time given their collective importance to NIF.
June 3, 2009:
“Thousands attend NIF dedication”
https://amp.spie.org/news/0602-nif-dedication
In months approaching September 2012…:
Some longtime NIF upper managers with perhaps some inside knowledge…decide not hang around until September 2012, the month of NIF reckoning, and decide to retire.
By September 2012:
NIF Fails to Reach “Ignition”
Many dedicated LLNS so called “Career Indefinite Employees”, were “NIF’d” into ETA/EBA status while Supplemental Labor employees kept their NIF positions. Once this part of the NIF FTE workforce “axe plan” was complete, then,
November 2012:
Art Wong SHRM AD, announces sweeping changes in the “Career Indefinite Employee” lay off policy that had been secretly in the works with the NNSA for the previous ~6 months. The term “Individual RIF” relating to those now in LLNS ETA/EBA status, was defined in Art Wong’s NNSA approved and published documentation release. Turns out by shear luck, Art Wong was ahead of the curve, and constructed new NNSA approved LLNS lay off policies 6 months before anyone believed NIF would fail to reach Ignition coupled with its associated budget cuts. Impressive. Hmm.
May 16, 2013:
“Feinstein declines to halt NIF budget cuts”
“Feinstein is a member of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee and chairs its subcommittee on energy and water development…She rejected their request to support NIF's request for $486.6 million for the coming year, saying it "is hard to justify" as there is no "clear path forward for achieving ignition."
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/feinstein-declines-to-halt-nif-budget-cuts-4523794.php
They put an arbitrary spot on the map, at least two orders of magnitude from real “success, and took 10 years longer than expected to reach that spot. It is, in the truest sense, meaningless. Meanwhile real fusion research must compete with this elephant in the room.
https://phys.org/news/2023-08-lab-nuclear-fusion-feat-higher.html
Not even close yet, but for arguments sake, let’s say NIF can reach *ignition once every 86,400 seconds (86,400 seconds = 24 hours).
What undisclosed to the public, high power laser system has been externally peer reviewed that would successfully take the shot rate above of 1 shot/86,400 seconds, all the way up to 10 shots/second? In other words, a 864,000x increase in SUCCESSFUL non-stop 10Hz rep-rate *ignition shots, where *ignition is defined below?
*viable NIF ignition is defined as the (fusion output energy)/(wall plug input energy) ratio that would be practical for an actual fusion power plant
Can someone please hand NIF a new piece of threaded pipe? We need to connect two dreams together.
These articles did not say what the fusion yield was, just that it was higher than the previous shot. Maybe it was 4.2 Megajoules and they didn't want anyone to say it was a milliton of TNT, so they didn't announce it?
“Many dedicated LLNS so called “Career Indefinite Employees”, were “NIF’d” into ETA/EBA status while Supplemental Labor employees kept their NIF positions.”
The DOE/NNSA need to be intellectually honest here, since a prototype fusion power plant is likely 10 to 20 years out, under the best of circumstances.
Tax payers deserve to know how their dollars are being spent, and why new fission plants, far less prone to human error or structural failure than existing fission plants, are not being aggressively pursued as todays bridge technology, while we wait 10, 20, or more years for a prototype fusion plant to go online. Else we are all getting “NIF’d”.
The local Livermore news is talking about it:
https://patch.com/california/livermore/lawrence-livermore-repeats-fusion-energy-breakthrough-reports
“The experiment briefly generated 3.15 megajoules of energy output, more than the 2.05 megajoules from the laser energy used to drive it, according to the US Department of Energy.”
And ~300MJ of input energy from PG&E (the grid) for ~3MJ energy output, so they need 100x more energy out just to breakeven, but it is progress.
Was the number of NIF ignition failures disclosed between the referenced December 2022 shot and the referenced July 2023 shot? Just asking.
That’s not the fusion we are looking for.
8/23/2023 10:54 AM
Actually NIF doesn’t use any electricity from PG&E, it comes from the WAPA substation across Grenville that has a transmission line that runs back to the Central Valley Project substation adjacent to the Jones pumping plant in Tracy (Mountain House now). When the power plant at Kennett (Shasta)was authorized AEC was given a certain amount of power for free minus the cost of transmission, it an expenditure listed in the CVP budget. PG&E is a backup source for the lab, and the lab actually lost power in I think it was 2020 when the supply from western was shut down for construction and was using PG&E supplemental power. PG&E ended up dropping the lab during a heat wave to keep their customers power on.
“Actually NIF doesn’t use any electricity from PG&E, it comes from the WAPA substation across Grenville that has a transmission line that runs back to the Central Valley Project substation adjacent to the Jones pumping plant in Tracy (Mountain House now).”
Thank you for the correction, but it doesn’t change the 3MJ output to the 300MJ input challenge, but there is hope. Interesting that nobody has responded to the number of failed NIF ignition shots between the 2 energy gain shots(?).
Where NIF gets its grid power from, is a much more palatable subject than how MUCH grid energy they used for each of the two NIF “gain” shots. How many no “gain” shots is perhaps, not a road to travel…
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